Dallas Historical Society - API

Overview

The Portal to Texas History provides public access to a number of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to the collections within the system. Below are examples of APIs available for Dallas Historical Society that can be used openly by those interested in programmatically accessing data from this system. You do not need to apply for a special key to use these APIs.

For additional information about these APIs or if you have general questions about machine interaction with The Portal to Texas History please contact Mark Phillips.

OAI-PMH

The Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) allows programmatic access to this partner's metadata. Two metadata formats are currently supported, the standard oai_dc and the UNT Libraries native metadata format untl.

Below are example URLs which demonstrate some of the standard views of this OAI-PMH repository:

In addition to the IIIF Collection level Manifest for this partner each object is made available using the IIIF Presentation API. By adding `manifest` to the end of the URL you can access the IIIF JSON that further links to other resources available in the object.

Here is an example URL that will return the JSON file for a IIIF Presentation Manifest.

SRU

Search/Retrieval via URL (SRU) can be used to run advanced queries on the content of this partner. A human-readable stylesheet has been added to help demonstrate searches via SRU. You can see this interface at the following URL.

OpenSearch

OpenSearch is a search protocol which enables simple full-text searches to be performed on this partner's content. The availability of this protocol is advertised in a LINK header element of the site's HTML template as "Search Dallas Historical Society," using this OpenSearch Description document.

A human-readable stylesheet has been added to help demonstrate searches via OpenSearch. You can see this interface at the following url.

Custom Search

A custom search can be embedded on your local sites to query The Portal to Texas History. You can copy and paste this code into the page you'd like to feature this search form. Note, you may need to adjust the HTML to match your site's branding/style guidelines.

Identifiers

The response will be application/txt containing one ARK identifier per line.

Titles

A convenient way to obtain a list of all titles for the Dallas Historical Society is to append 'titles.txt' to the base of the collection URL. The response will be application/txt containing one title per line.

A JSON formatted response is also available by appending 'titles.json'. In addition to the title, a link to the search results for just that title in the system and the number of items associated with that title are given. An optional callback parameter can be used if needed.